Delhi High Court Justice Prathiba Singh said intellectual property (IP) law must evolve for the age of artificial intelligence (AI). She said that existing IP frameworks were designed to recognise human ingenuity and are now being challenged by the rise of “artificial intellect,” according to a Bar & Bench report.
She made these comments at the AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi. Justice Singh spoke during a session titled “Catalysing Global Investment for Equitable and Responsible AI in Health”, held at Bharat Mandapam as part of the event hosted by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) and IndiaAI on February 20, 2026.
The Question of Authorship in AI-Generated Content
“Do we assign joint authorship? Do we provide joint ownership? To what degree must human involvement occur for a patent to be issued in the field of artificial intelligence?” she asked, addressing the ownership claims in the AI-generated content and outputs.
Her question is pertinent because most AI platforms, such as OpenAI (ChatGPT, Sora, DALL-E) or Google (Gemini, Imagen, Veo), give ownership of the content they generate to the user. However, a contractual agreement between a company and an individual does not necessarily confer statutory copyright protection under relevant copyright laws.
The Need to Update TRIPS, WTO Agreements
For instance, Section 2(d) of India’s Copyright Act states that the “author” of a computer-generated work is the person who causes the work to be created. Users may note that the person who writes the prompts may claim the authorship rights to the works generated. Addressing such an argument, a United States district court in 2023 ruled that “US copyright law protects only works of human creation”.
“This begs the question- who is the ‘person’ who has caused the work to be created? The developer of the AI tool, the user who inputs the query or the AI tool itself?” argued Pallavi Sondhi, Senior Associate at Ikigai Law.
However, further exploring the dilemmas of copyrightability of GenAI content, Sondhi, the author of the blog post, argues that “anyone who has experimented with these tools would struggle to argue that the output is mere compilations which lack creativity”. She made this argument because copyright law generally requires original creativity or expression to claim the rights to it.
Then she asks:
“Does ‘creativity’ necessarily require the involvement of a human mind?”
Such unresolved questions indicate the need for legal clarity regarding AI-generated content, especially as tools become more accessible and adoption increases. “Do we need to revise the TRIPS agreement (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights)? Do we have to revise or renegotiate World Trade Organisation (WTO) treaties? Do we need to update patent laws in various countries?” asked Justice Singh.
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